DANIEL Sudbury bought his first house when he was a 21-year-old student at Manchester University. Ten years on he owns 41 properties in south Manchester worth around £4.5m.

Daniel is one of the people who began playing the property game at just the right time and has come out a winner.

But he says: "My first house wasn't a money making exercise as such - I just wanted somewhere decent to live."

He managed to buy the four-bed Edwardian semi in Fallowfield in 1993 on a 100 per cent mortgage guaranteed by his parents and paid the debt with rent he got from three friends who shared the house.

After university he kept the house to rent out and bought a flat in Withington for £26,000 for himself. Although he did a variety of jobs, including at one time being an estate agent, he had already got the property bug.

He said: "I bought a terrace in Rusholme to rent out to students and a studio in Withington but back then banks were unwilling to lend to you more than once and there was nothing around like the buy-to-let products of today.

"But my father, who was the director at Liverpool Art Gallery, had just retired and I borrowed the money for them off him. You have to remember that the market was stagnant, properties were being repossessed and it was a hard market. He took a huge risk on me."

By the late 90s with the housing market on the rise, funding became easier to find and Daniel established a relationship with Mortgages for Business. He said: "You have to have faith in your lender and they have to have faith in you."

Daniel's strategy was to buy run-down properties in an area he knew, around M14, renovate them to a high standard and rent them to students.

Timing

He said: "Timing is everything with this market. You have to buy them early then get them back on just as the students are looking.

"I used to do a lot of the work myself but now I have a team of lads to do every aspect of it and I make sure they are done well so I can charge more, £60 a week, and I employ my own management team to deal with any problems or repairs quickly."

Despite vowing that this year he would buy no more he has so far bought 10 properties, one a month, with an average price of £100,000.

But he has not been tempted to buy in Manchester city centre, "Not because there is anything wrong with it but it was just not something I knew. I saw it, perhaps wrongly, as being construction-led, not people-led.

"I did miss the boat in Preston though. I should have invested there."

He says his best buy was the flat in Withington, which over eight years has increased in value sixfold. His worst was paying £152,000 for a derelict block of bedsits in Whalley Range last summer, which he planned to convert into four two-bed flats.

He was having second thoughts when the guy who owned the house next door asked if he could buy the block and paid him £20,000 more then he had paid.

"I turned it round in eight weeks so perhaps it wasn't my worst buy but it felt like it for a short time."

He has the trappings of wealth: a house in south Manchester, another in Spain and a Ferrari but is unassuming about his success.

"I actually enjoy what I do. It has been hard work and I have been helped by the incredible rise in the market, but actually I am very conservative and prudent," he said. "You cannot expect the phenomenal returns of the last five years to continue and I keep saying I will not buy any more and then someone tells me about something and I just have to go and see it!"